Everyone Should Hear a Nightingale, Every Spring: a guest blog from Chris Rose

Chris Packham has done a heroic job in supporting Birdlife Malta and raising the profile of the massacre that migrants face in Malta.   I want to keep a profile on our magnificent migrants and so today, Chris Rose (campaign guru and co-founder of the Fairyland Trust) celebrates the song of one of our best loved migrants, the nightingale. 

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Wouldn't it improve our quality of life, if every man, woman and child in the UK could hear at least one nightingale sing, every spring? If you agree, please sign my petition asking the BBC to broadcast nightingale song live, on May 18th here.   

Perhaps Lord Reith, famous first leader of the BBC thought so, for on May 18th 1924, a singing nightingale in a Surrey wood (with a famous cellist playing along) was the centerpiece of the BBC’s first ever ‘Outside Broadcast’. It was by wireless of course,  and as any birdwatcher knows, there is little point in trying to see a nightingale but every point in making the effort to hear one.

An estimated one million people tuned in to that first ‘OB’.  The BBC and the cellist, Beatrice Harrison, were deluged with 50,000 letters of appreciation. So popular was the nightingale broadcast that thousands of people joined organised trips to the Surrey woods to hear the birds, and the BBC repeated the broadcast each May, until it was stopped in mid-broadcast in 1942, during the Second World War.  The sound of that wartime bird, recorded but never trasnmitted, has the noise of RAF bombers gathering overhead, in the background.  It is one of the spookiest, most evocative things I have ever heard – listen here. 

When May approaches, my thoughts always turn to making the trip to my nearest reliable singing nightingales at Salthouse Heath in Norfolk but there do seem to be fewer than when I lived there a decade or so ago. If true, that is not surprising: the BTO found that nightingales declined by over 50% between 1995 and 2008, and there are reasons to think they are in deep trouble.  Muntjac deer are munching through the thick undergrowth they favour, and like many other migrants which spend much of the year in Africa, their habitat is threatened by climate change, and wholesale land use change for agriculture.  In this country, even the Lodge Hill nightingale stronghold  in Kent is threatened by house building, while most all insect-eating birds are in decline, probably because of the pervasive and insidious effects of widespread pollution from neonicotinoids and other agri-poisons.

So I think it is high time that the BBC, the great informer and relayer of British national passions and culture, re-instated the nightingale tradition, with another OB this May 18th.  If the BBC has trouble finding a singing nightingale in these depleted times, I feel sure that readers of this blog, if not the RSPB itself, will be up to the task of locating one, or several.

Nightingales are not the harbingers of spring but the soul of spring, with us like swifts, for only a few months before departing from our shores but from not our hearts.  With the right conservation efforts, our landscape could once again be made much more nightingale-friendly and the lives of our children and theirs could be enriched by their song.  

As David Attenborough said, “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”.  A recording is not the same as the real thing, any more than a stuffed Dodo or Great Auk is a real bird.  But hearing a real nightingale live is a step closer to experiencing the magic, and who knows, perhaps the RSPB or others could organise gatherings for those who wanted to get closer to authentic nature, to quietly stand and listen to nightingales, just as our great grandparents did in the 1920s and 1930s.  If you want to encourage the BBC, contact anyone in the organisation that you know, or if you don’t know anyone, ask your local radio station or tv programme to set up a broadcast – the contacts are at www.bbc.co.uk. 

You can read more about the nightingale broadcast here and sign the petition here. 

Thank you

Chris Rose
chris@campaignstrategy.co.uk

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I shall give you an update on Chris' petition and challenge to the RSPB next week.